


the root of love

by anon_drabble



Category: Grounded (Video Game), Mystic Messenger (Video Game)
Genre: Alternate Universe, Crossover, F/M, M/M, NaNoWriMo 2020, fun being tiny in a big backyard
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-07
Updated: 2020-11-07
Packaged: 2021-03-09 03:07:08
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,912
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27427657
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/anon_drabble/pseuds/anon_drabble
Summary: a grounded au fic of mystic messenger! (think honey i shrunk the kids but honey i shrunk the otome men)this is basically two ocs finding themselves tiny with jumin and zen in the backyard of grounded. mostly just silly hijinks and flirting/love stories.
Relationships: Han Jumin/Original Character(s), Han Jumin/Original Male Character(s), Zen | Ryu Hyun/Original Character(s), Zen | Ryu Hyun/Original Female Character(s)
Kudos: 1





	the root of love

**Author's Note:**

> jaf and i decided to try a joint project for nanowrimo and this is what happened lol. this is just a teaser, kind of testing the waters to see if anyone is interested in reading the rest. let us know if you'd like to see more!

Working in a basement, hand-written notes littering the floor, the dark suggesting not only a lack of light but the possibility that light had never shown there. A sense of permanent dark, that no amount of light could dispel. That was where he performed his work. Where he built the tools, where he tested his creations… That was where it started. That was where he sat, huddled, hiding his secrets from the prying eyes he imagined would be after his experiments. An imagined threat or was his paranoia finally correct? It hardly mattered. The experiment performed as expected but only halfway. It worked splendidly! Until it was time to return to normal. In that situation, there was no solution. 

Testing on inanimate objects proved successful. But time was running short and the test on human subjects needed to begin immediately. Testing had to take place there, away from prying eyes. Away from pesky questions and perhaps most importantly, away from those too ignorant to understand the beauty of the experiment. 

Remarkably, the human testing worked just as spectacularly as all other tests! The innocent victims, however, had they always been part of the plan? 

When Naree opened her eyes, she discovered… Well, not much. Nothing to see as it was just shadows more than inches in front of her face. But the smell was familiar. It was a deep smell, something that gave Naree a sense of nostalgia but she couldn’t place from where. She heard the sound of stirring beside her. Now that her eyes were adjusting, she saw more of her surroundings. What she saw didn’t make much sense. Directly in front of her appeared to be a wall. With...roots? 

“What is this?” a voice said beside her. Next to her, a man stood, looking equally confused. He had long white hair, tied back in a ponytail. She didn’t recognize him but saw two other figures next on the other side of him. 

“We’re underground, aren’t we?” she pondered, taking a step forward to inspect the wall. Placing a hand on it, it felt cool but characteristically of dirt. 

“What? No way,” the man said, stepping up to touch the wall. Naree glanced behind him at the other two men. They looked as confused as she was. 

“There’s light that way. Maybe we should go out there?” 

“Yes. We can get our bearings there,” one of the other men said, with black hair. 

Naree took the lead, cautiously poking her head out into the sunlight. It took a few blinks to get used to the light but once she could see, she rather wished she couldn’t. All around them, in every direction was grass. Which would have been fine, had it been the normal grass. But instead, it stretched above her, towering high overhead. Each blade seemed like a tree. They were in a forest in every sense of the word. Except that the grass took the place of trees. Naree felt weak, she teetered backward when the sheer scope of what was around her became evident. A hand reached out and steadied her, the man with white hair standing behind her, his head also craned back to see the grass. 

“This has to be a dream,” she murmured as the others joined them. The man with black hair looked infuriatingly calm considering the situation. 

“I doubt that. However, it does seem impossible,” he said dryly. 

“‘Seem impossible’?” the man with white hair repeated, his voice betraying his frustration. “It is impossible! Look at that! That is GRASS!” He pointed to a mushroom in the distance. Even as far away as it was, it was clear it stood taller than they were. “That’s a mushroom that’s taller than we are! What is this world of giant plants?!” 

Naree shook her head. “No… That’s not it. They’re not giant plants. We’re small… Aren’t we?” The fear in her voice was evident. The man with black hair pursed his lips, silently agreeing with her grim assessment.

The third man stepped up, his gilded eyes wide and shadowed beneath the fringe of chestnut bangs. Naree noticed he observed their surroundings with doeful gazes and his hand carefully cradling his chin. 

"Right now, the best conclusion is that we're small." He slipped his hands into the pockets of his lab coat. "However we cannot afford to focus on that—"

"Dude," the man with white hair interjected, swiping his hand around for emphasis. "This is kinda important!'

"Be that as it may, we have three priorities right now this moment." Lab coat guy grit out. 

Naree stepped forward, wringing her hands as she watched him cautiously. "And that is?"

"Food, water, shelter." He hummed. "Who knows how long we were out."

The silver haired man looked as he had an epiphany. 

Tugging at the cuff pins of his suit, the raven haired man seemed to concur. "Without those three survival needs fulfilled, it'll be difficult for us to make it through the night."

"Our best bet will be to find high ground," the third man continued. "We're free game on the ground floor like this and as much as I would like to curl up into a fetal position and cry myself to sleep—finding someplace safe should come first."

“What are you TALKING ABOUT?!” the man with the long, white hair exploded. “Food, shelter? We’re the size of fleas! How can you think about anything else?” he ranted. 

Naree looked at each man in turn. She agreed that survival needs had to be met but that felt like a secondary problem in her mind. “I think…” she began softly, so as to force the one yelling to quiet down for a moment. “I think we should take a look around first. Find the higher ground, like you said,” she indicated the man with brown hair, “But we need to get a better idea of what’s going on. Where we are. Maybe there’s a way to get us back to normal so we won’t have to worry about survival first.” She again looked at each of them in turn. “It seems like none of us know what’s going on. I don’t know where we are and I don’t even know your names. But no matter what, if we have to survive or if we can find a way out of this mess, we’ll have to cooperate. Getting mad at each other won’t solve anything.” She forced a smile and held out her hand. “My name is Naree. I don’t know what this nightmare is but it’s nice to meet you.” 

First, the chestnut-haired man in a lab coat shook her hand. He introduced himself as Emrys. Next was the white-haired man, who gave her a wink as he said he was Zen. Finally, the tallest of the group, the one with black hair, gave his name simply as Jumin. 

“This forest of grass should be our first step,” Emrys explained, looking up at the bladed canopy with a calculated and measured stare. “They’re probably not as high as we would like, however, it’ll give us better sights of well...wherever we are.”

“How? They’re normal grass blades,” Jumin chimed in, following the other man’s line of sight. “Smooth and untextured. Hardly desirous to climb.”

“There are clovers…” Zen squinted and pointed to a slightly darker and definitely shorter patch of green that rested just a few paces in front of them.

Naree nodded and looked to the others. “We could use those like stepping stones.”

The white-haired man snapped. “Exactly.”

The group shuffled slowly to the clovers - to Emrys’ request, him having bid them a we don’t know what’s out there so we should be particularly cautious. Stopping at the roots, both Naree and Zen scrambled up first, easily finding their footing as they clambered up with surprising agility. The man in the lab coat cheered them on while Jumin urged them to be careful. When they came to the tops of the clovers, it was on to the grass. 

Turning to her with that, the white-haired man gave her an uneasy smile that gradually melted into something confident. “Mind if I go first? It might be easier to have someone pull you up once at the top. Likewise if I fall, at least you’ll still be waiting on the clover, I’d feel bad if shaking the grass or something would make you fall too.”

“It’d probably be quicker if I tried to hop up there first.” She gently protested.

“But who’d be here to catch me if I fell?” Zen chuckled watching as she approached the closest grass stalk.

Naree laughed and gestured to the two men waiting down below for them. “I’m sure one of them would be more than happy to.”

His spluttering slowly faded as she chuckled to herself and climbed up. It was easy to lose the fear for just a moment, focusing only on the way her fingers and knuckles tightened around the slim and near-sharp edges of the grass. Trying to make precise placements of her feet as she found where to press her toes and where to dig her knees in. It was more like a crawl than a climb really. But once she got a sense of it, she started to clamber up faster, lungs heaving as she took in the clean air and kept her attention trained to the blue sky just over the tip of grass. 

One final pull and she had made it as far as she could go. She dug her toes into the smooth green surface, it looked like jade but contrary to Jumin’s suspicions of it being without texture, grooves ran parallel with the length of the stalk - making it easy for her to grind her steps into the dips of the plant and push herself up again to find her balance. Her stomach pitched as she stood and the world unfurled around her in a dazzle of warm afternoon light. 

Everything glittered with a green sheen, the light catching off the expanse of foliage that seemed to never end. Shrubbery, grass, trees - everything towered and flooded her vision from edge to edge. Dizziness overcame her as the mere idea that if a tree from her looked like Mount Everest, how tall was that perfectly normally and totally not ginormous oak supposed to be? The yard in front of them danced back and forth to the warm breeze, and on the veranda tall tulips of every pastel shade wavered to-and-fro to the same rhythmic beat. Overhead, leaves rustled, sounding like a world of paper fans clattering against one another. She tottered back on her heels, vision swinging up to the sky with a sudden jolt of vertigo. 

A hand rested on the small of her back and her vision snapped over to Zen who had now joined her side. 

His lips drew thin and his eyes narrowed as he followed her gaze. A fence lined the entire perimeter, caging them in further - as if the totality of the backyard wasn’t enough to seem like some sort of labyrinth. His jaw pulled taut and his teeth grit while crimson eyes glowered angrily. 

“This is impossible,” he muttered.

She gave a little nod, finding her voice stuck like a wad of molasses at the back of her throat.

“Guys, we have a problem!” The voice shot up the blade of grass, shattering the terrified silence that drew Zen and Naree’s attention.


End file.
